Talk:POP-11

I removed the "powerful" accolade from the opening sentence of the article.

20 years after Computers and Thought, all hyperbole aside, POPLOG is another failure in the claims of conventional AI for cognitive science. A visit to PDC.dk and a search for PROLOGIA in France will clearly show where PROLOG has gone: into inustrial applications where suited - not cog sci. DROOLS in JBoss has nothing to do with Cog Sci, but like ILOG and JLOG is one of the few success stories. The recent interest in Clojure and the presence of F# at Microsoft are hopeful signs.

A language with a similar fate is ICON. A very limited logic language focussed on strings. Erlang is a case where a very dumbed-down lgic language has proven useful - but telecom switches ain't AI.

Whether XSB can make a difference for the Semantic Web ( a very modst objective ) is an open question ( and agaiin, very far from "cog sci".

One thing Sloman followers might do is go back to look at the first two decades of the 20th Century when Russell failed to spend time in Gottingen or Halle. What is required is a re-evaluation of Frege -somthing the later Wittgenstein does not give us. This may come with another generation in philosophy.

Wittgensteinian "therapy" will not help resolve conundrums in neuroscience any more than it would have helped Boltzmann at the time atomism was being ridiculed and rejected.